Vice Lords Inc: Bobby Gore, David Dawley and The Woodlawn Organization
With the help of a former Peace Corps operative and the immensely wealthy Rockefeller Foundation, Chicago’s Vice Lords created an empire which exists to this day. The gang was even the subject of a feature length documentary (Lord Thing, 1970), which set out their claim to be a positive force for change in the community. As the story went, the Lords had left behind their destructive ways when they embraced Black Power in the mid-1960s and began to incorporate legitimate businesses. While the broader strokes were true, the reality behind this narrative is that the story of their rise to power is far less straightforward, relating to the wider shifts taking place in the power structures of urban American at the time.
Founded in the late 1950s by residents of an Illinois boys home, the Vice Lords soon took over their chunk of the West Side, building up a base for their shift into political activism. Rebranding themselves the Conservative Vice Lord Nation, they opened a number of legitimate businesses, including the “African Lion” clothing store and an operation named “Teen Town” by the gang. Exactly what Teen Town’s function was is unclear. According to the University of Illinois in Chicago’s official magazine, the business was simply an ice cream parlor. At the same time, a profile of David Dawley, who served as a key ally for the Lords, describes it as a recreation centre.
Having graduated from the prestigious Dartmouth University in, Dawley had spent two years in the newly formed Peace Corps, working in Honduras. Established by the Kennedy administration, the Peace Corps sent young Americans around the world, supposedly to assist with development efforts. From the start however, the outreach would be accused of functioning as a front for the Central Intelligence Agency, to the point where the Peace Corps was forced to pass an edict in 1981 forbidding recruitment from America’s foreign intelligence service. Whatever the exact relationship between the two, what is undeniable is that they both recruited heavily from the elite circles that Dawley had emerged from, united by a desire to bring down the political machines of large cities such as Chicago.
As for Dawley himself, he finished his service in the Peace Corps a year before the Lords embraced politics. Returning to the United States, he found a job with the TransCentury Corporation, a private firm established by a former administrator in the Peace Corps named Warren Wiggins:
“Dave was a superb Peace Corps volunteer and an outstanding community development guy,” says Dick Irish, the primary recruiter at TransCentury and a former director of talent search at the Peace Corps. “He really understood the psychology of gangs and how you could channel that organizational skill they had.
With TransCentury winning a federal contract to complete a survey for the President’s Council on Youth Opportunity, Dawley was dispatched to Chicago, beginning his entry into the city’s turbulent underworld. At the time, street gangs formed by Chicago’s growing African and Hispanic populations were beginning to challenge the syndicates already established by white ethnic groups such as Italians or Irish. These were a vital base of support for the machine that Mayor Richard Daley ruled over, and so they would mobilise in defence of the status quo. When civil rights hero Martin Luther King had visited Chicago in support of the integrationist open housing movement, he would be greeted by stone-throwing members of the “greaser” gangs which served as farm teams for groups such as the Mafia.
Daley himself had risen from obscurity with the Hamburg Athletic Club, a neighbourhood organisation which operated to recruit youths into service for the complex hierarchy of the Chicago political machine. During race riots against the city’s black population following World War One, the Hamburgs had been at the forefront of the violence, which had broken out at a beach on the South side and succeeded in driving much of the victims from Chicago.
A few years later, Daley became President of the club, the beginning of his rise to the Mayoralty in 1955. By then, African-Americans had flooded back to the city as part of a wider shift from the South to the North, leading to conflict with the locals, particularly white ethnic groups such as the Irish, upon which the Daley machine relied for their support. A common theme in the history of the Vice Lords, as with similar gangs, is that they came together for defence against the greasers, with their rumbles representing the violent edge of race relations in the big cities. While these began as simple street fights, as the 1960s went on, they would gain support from the reformist elite, such as Dawley, as part of their decades-long struggle against America’s urban machines. Having failed to overcome these highly entrenched power structures on their own, they would come to see the gangs as ground troops which could tip the balance of the war in their favour.
Having hired the Vice Lords to carry out the TransCentury survey, Dawley would rent a room at a local YMCA in Lawndale, the heart of their territory. In October 1967, he was called back to the company’s headquarters in Washington DC to finish off his report. By December however, he was back in Chicago, where he secured a $15,000 grant from the powerful Rockefeller Foundation to set up the “Conservative Vice Lords Incorporated” group, the vehicle used by the gang to set up their legitimate enterprises. In their publications, the President of the CVL Inc was identified as Alonso Alford, while Bobby Gore served as the spokesperson for the group.
With the support of Dawley and his contacts, the Lords established themselves as a serious power in the streets of Chicago, forming a lasting relationship with a gang which had gone through a similar transformation, the Blackstone Rangers. Having changed their name to the Black P. Stones, they were based in Chicago’s South Side, and were working at the time for The Woodlawn Organization, a community action group which was funded by the federal government as part of the War on Poverty. A collaboration between Saul Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation and local religious leaders, TWO had been awarded just short of a million dollars to teach job skills, with alleged corruption by the Stones soon to be a source of controversy.
Along with Mayor Daley, the alliance of street gangs and urban reformers was watched with unease by J. Edgar Hoover, longtime Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. A staunch conservative, Hoover was a strong supporter of the status quo, having played a quietly important role in creating the “McCarthyism” hysteria in the early years of the Cold War. Part of his traditionalist agenda, this saw his liberal rivals within the federal government, including the CIA, accused of harbouring Communists.
Even with the opposition of Director Hoover, the TWO contract was a crucial catalyst for the Black P. Stones, much in the same way that the Rockefeller money had been for the Vice Lords. Along with a third group, the Gangster Disciples, they formed the LSD alliance, taking part in protests held on local construction sites. In doing so, they worked closely with a rising star in Chicago’s activist world, Jesse Jackson, along with a more shadowy entity called the General and Specialty Contractors Association, a lobby group supported by the Ford Foundation. Attacking organised labour, the coalition made various demands, including for the end to the role of unions in hiring workers.
Despite their claimed radicalism however, the gangs, particularly the Stones, proved hostile to the efforts of the Black Panther Party, particularly Fred Hampton, head of the Illinois chapter. With their demands for an end to gang violence and hard drugs, not to mention the abolition of capitalism, the Panthers were a significant challenge to more than just the Stones. Although they were no friend of the Daley machine, they had also outgrown the Black nationalist scene from which they had emerged, embracing Marxist thought in their dramatically successful, if ultimately short-lived, efforts to organise the ghetto.
As a result, Jeff Fort of the Stones constantly rejected overtures by Illinois Panther chairman Fred Hampton, demanding that the leftist group submitted to his authority. In the streets, this translated into physical confrontations between the Stones and the Panthers, as the former attempted to keep the latter out. The tension even culminated in a BPP member being shot while selling newspapers on the West Side, taking place as the Stones and the Lords continued to grow closer. In the end, the conflict was largely ended by the murder of Hampton in a police raid on the BPP headquarters in late 1969, which severely disrupted the party’s efforts to organise Chicago.
By this point, the battle for America was being decided on the side of the reformists, through their links to insurgent power structures which included the Vice Lords. While the city machines were not completely destroyed, they were significantly weakened, to the point where they were largely helpless in the face of change. At the same time, the process of reshaping urban politics proved to be a turbulent one, in which individuals proved to be highly disposable.
In early 1969, Alfonso Alfred suffered a stroke, severely affecting his ability to function as official head of CVL Inc. Later that year, Bobby Gore was sent to prison for murder. Facing these setbacks, the Lords were awarded a further $275,000 from the Rockefeller Foundation, a sum worth more than a million today. That same year, a film about the gang, Lord Thing, was produced.
Produced at the height of the black power movement in the early ’70s, LORD THING is an insider history into the genesis and transformation of the Conservative Vice Lords gang, one of Chicago’s oldest street gangs. Partially shaped and told by by CVL members who also appear in the film, LORD THING is a unique and powerful tool that expresses an effort in self-transformation during a volatile and violent time in US race history.
Lord Thing won a silver medal at the 1970 Venice Film Festival, then appears to have dropped out of the public record. Then, with great fanfare, it was declared to have been found in the archives of its now-deceased director, DeWitt Beall. As it emerged, Beall had directed a few more pieces, including for the Ford Foundation-backed Public Broadcasting Service, before moving to California to design kitchens, where he died in 2006.
Six years later, his widow, Elina Katsioula-Beall, is said to have found the supposedly lost tape, handing it over to the Chicago Film Archive, which received funding from the federally-funded National Film Preservation Foundation to preserve and digitise the film. Curiously enough, this was several years after segments of the film were used in an episode of the History Channel’s “Gangland” series, indicating that there were other copies out there. Whatever the truth about the film, the discrepancy over its existence is just another mystery surrounding the rise of the Vice Lords in the South side of Chicago